Using data and analytics to support students

Category Archives: Code of Practice

Last Friday, representatives from a number of early adopter universities came together at Jisc’s Bristol offices to work on some of the areas that need to be tackled in their institutional learning analytics projects. Jisc’s Director of Data and Analytics, Michael Webb, demonstrated a new Data Explorer tool which provides useful visualisations, enabling institutions to … Read more

Institutions that are rolling out learning analytics projects will have to address a range of new and often complex issues. This is likely to mean developing an institutional policy specifically to address these issues or adapting existing policies. Jisc’s Code of Practice for Learning Analytics provides a checklist of the areas which may need to be handled … Read more

Around 90 people signed up for our latest event which took place last week at Bradford University. Trevor Meek and his colleagues provided the venue, and we spent most of the day examining aspects of Jisc’s architecture for learning analytics and looking at ethical, legal and adoption issues for institutions. Michael Webb started off the … Read more

Today Jisc is launching the Code of Practice for Learning Analytics at the UCISA Spotlight on Digital Capabilities event here in the amazing MediaCityUK at Salford Quays. Developing this document was chosen by institutions as the number one priority for Jisc’s learning analytics programme. The Code aims to help universities and colleges develop strategies for dealing … Read more

Jisc’s draft Code of Practice for Learning Analytics is now available for public consultation for the next two weeks: Code of Practice for Learning Analytics v04 [MS Word]. We’ve already had some very useful comments back from a number of invited organisations and individuals which will help to enhance the document and the accompanying online guidance. The background to … Read more

Jisc, Apereo and the Lace Project held a workshop in Paris on 6th February to discuss the ethical and legal issues of learning analytics. The focus of this meeting was the draft taxonomy of issues that I prepared previously. It was extremely helpful to have comments from experts in the area to refine the list, which is forming … Read more

In discussions around the ethics and legal issues of learning analytics I’ve found the same issues cropping up again and again. Almost always they’ve already been covered somewhere in the growing collection of publications on learning analytics. Sometimes they’re expressed in different ways but boil down to the same underlying problem. The literature review of … Read more

A wide-ranging discussion took place in London last week to discuss the emerging Code of Practice for Learning Analytics. A new advisory group for the Code includes representatives from the National Union of Students, Edinburgh, Huddersfield, Lancaster and Loughborough Universities, Bucks New University, The Open University, Croydon College and Jisc. A Code of Practice for Learning … Read more

Do institutions need to obtain consent from students before collecting and using data about their online learning activities? Should learners be allowed to opt out of having data collected about them? Could showing students predictions about their likelihood of academic success have a negative effect on their motivation and make them more likely to drop … Read more

We had a lively session on ethics and legal issues at the Jisc Effective Learning Analytics workshop last week, kicking it off by outlining some of the key questions in this area: Who should have access to data about students’ online activities? Are there any circumstances when collecting data about students is unacceptable/undesirable? Should students be … Read more